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Boyhood's End

Introduction

It was typical of Tippett that, commissioned to write a piece for Peter Pears and Benjamin Britten on their return from the USA in 1943 (it was premiered by the dedicatees in 1945), he should have chosen to set not verse, but a prose text, and moreover to cast the work in the form of a Purcellian cantata, with four consecutive sections of strongly contrasted tempo and mood.

The influence of Purcell was critical for Tippett who, like Britten himself, felt strongly the need to get away from the Romantic–pastoral vein of previous generations of English composers, and sought a new approach through a harking back to the music of the pre-Romantic past. In the case of Boyhood’s End the Purcellian influence is largely structural, in the suggestion of recitative, arioso and aria, the melismatic vocal-writing and sometimes quasi-modal harmony, while the lean, energetic cross-rhythms owe as much to Tippett’s interest in jazz as to those in Elizabethan and Jacobean dance music. In this of course he had much in common with American contemporaries like Aaron Copland and Elliott Carter, who were tuned in to a similar Zeitgeist. (As an aside, I remember Tippett in a lecture once recalling a would-be composer who had asked him for comments on his compositions. Evidently these exhibited the worst tendencies of English Romanticism, for the young man went away greatly offended when Tippett told him that what he needed was a course in hot jazz.)

The opening of Boyhood’s End is strikingly dramatic. Vigorous piano octaves announce the simple question: ‘What, then, did I want?’ The answer – ‘I want only to keep what I have’ – is an astonishing outburst, extending those eight short words through fifteen bars of virtuoso vocal-writing, from the fortissimo top A flat of ‘want’, itself lasting two and a half bars, to the pianissimo E natural an octave and a half lower of ‘have’. From here, Tippett builds the rest of the first section in a series of waves, the first two culminating in fanfare-like cadenzas in the piano, the third in the ecstatic exclamation ‘Oh, those wild beautiful cries of the golden plover!’. This in turn launches an even more energetic outburst, in which two words – ‘uprising’ and ‘dance’ – are again stretched to inordinate length in the kind of hocketing, syncopated melismas that would only resurface in Tippett’s music fifteen years later, when he came to compose Achilles’ war cry in King Priam.

The Andante section that follows is a complete contrast. The slow, almost motionless octaves of the piano part, imperceptibly expanding and contracting, seem satiated with heat, while the voice swoons in falling intervals, heavy with the sensual overload of Hudson’s recollections. In the Allegro molto the notion of riding evokes predictably dotted rhythms, and the multitude of flora and fauna – storks, ibises, grey herons, flamingos – invites cascades of piano semiquavers. Finally calming down, the closing Allegro piacevole completes the idyll, the long lines in both voice and piano spanning the octaves from lowest bass to highest treble, as the youth lies gazing at the ‘white-hot whitey-blue sky’ and the myriads of balls of thistledown, the final line, with its long-held top A, being a metaphor for his emotional transportation.

Boyhood’s End must have presented a formidable challenge to its dedicatees. Two years later Britten was to return the compliment. His first Canticle, My Beloved is Mine, is also cast in four contrasting sections, and in its opening pages comes as close as Britten ever did to imitating Tippett’s ecstatic, syncopated vocal melismas.

Recordings

'This is still a voice of youthful freshness, commanded with skill and assurance. The programme tests his musicianship very thoroughly, and it reveals ...'Sung by Mark Padmore who, on this form and in this repertory, seems to me to be unrivalled among younger English tenors … With Roger Vignoles as ...» More

'Issued to mark the composer's ninetieth birthday, a most touching and eloquent tribute' (Gramophone)'As the fullest representation at Tippett's solo vocal music in the catalogue this disc is a must, both for devotees of the composer and for collector ...» More

Details

What, then, did I want? What did I ask to have? If the question had been put to me then, and if I had been capable of expressing what was in me, I should have replied: I want only to keep what I have. To rise each morning and look out on the sky and the grassy dew-wet Earth, from day to day, from year to year. To watch each June and July for spring, to feel the same old sweet surprise and delight at th’ appearance of each familiar flower, ev’ry new-born insect, ev’ry bird returned once more from the north. To listen in a trance of delight to the wild notes of the golden plover coming once more to the great plain, flying south, flock succeeding flock the whole day long. Oh, those wild beautiful cries of the golden plover! I could exclaim with Hafiz with but one word changed: If after a thousand years that sound should float o’er my tomb, my bones uprising in their gladness would dance in the sepulchre.

To climb trees and put my hand down in the deep hot nest of the Bienteveo and feel the hot eggs, the five long-pointed cream-coloured eggs, with choc’late spots and splashes at the larger end. To lie on a grassy bank, with the blue water between me and beds of tall bulrushes, list’ning to the mysterious sounds of the wind and of hidden rails and coots and courlans conversing together in strange human-like tones: to let my sight dwell and feast on the camaloté flower amid its floating masses of moist vivid green leaves, the large alamanda-like flower of a purest divine yellow that, when plucked, leaves you with nothing but a green stem in your hand.

To ride at noon on the hottest days when the whole Earth is a-glitter with illusory water and see the cattle and horses in thousands cov’ring the plain at their watering places, to visit some haunt of large birds at that still, hot hour and see storks, ibises, grey herons, egrets of a dazzling whiteness and rose-coloured spoon-bills and flamingos standing in the shallow water in which their motionless forms are reflected.

To lie on my back on the rust-brown grass in January, to gaze up at the white-hot whitey-blue sky, peopled with millions and myriads of glist’ning balls of thistledown, ever floating by. To gaze and gaze, until they are to me living things, and I, in an ecstasy am with them, floating in that immense shining void!